Cold Case: Father's murder haunts children for 40 years

MUNCIE — Billy Miller and David Gordon Garrett were hellraisers and running buddies.

It was the early 1970s and the two men cut a sometimes-lawless swath between Muncie and Dunkirk.

Both men, but particularly Garrett, were known for what one veteran police officer called "low-level" crimes like burglary. Family members remembered hauls of tools, hams and circus tickets being brought home after one of Miller and Garrett's escapades.

Then something went wrong.

On the night of May 9, 1973, Albert Milton "Billy" Miller was shot at point blank range with a shotgun and left to die, face-down in a vacant lot near an auto body shop in Dunkirk. David Gordon Garrett promptly left town, driving a red 1958 Chevy pickup truck and accompanied by his 10-year-old son.

A few days later, Garrett was arrested near Richmond. His son was with him but no weapons were found.

Officers from Muncie, Jay County and Indiana State Police conducted an investigation. A grand jury indicted Garrett on a charge of murder on May 24, 1973 and he went to trial in Henry County.

But after a few days of testimony, the jury found Garrett not guilty.

It's a verdict that still frustrates Gerald Kirby, who was police chief in Dunkirk at the time.

"It was the only major case I had like that that we lost," Kirby told The Star Press. "It haunts you. It really does."

Perhaps no one has been more haunted by the slaying of Billy Miller than his daughter, Beth, who turned 7 years old the day after her father's body was found in a vacant lot in Dunkirk. She still remembers the police car pulling into the driveway of her family's home. She and her brothers and sister were hustled into a bedroom while officers told their mother that her husband wasn't coming home.

Her father's slaying became an accepted fact of life in the household. But after Beth Miller became an adult, she and her sister, Debbie, began their own investigation into their father's death. They collected newspaper clippings, copies of their father's autopsy report and court transcripts.

After reading earlier Cold Case: Muncie articles in The Star Press, they contacted the newspaper and asked for consideration of their father's case.

"I've been looking for 20 years," Beth Miller said. "I'm still mad. If he did it and they found him not guilty, there's nothing right about that. If he did not do it, somebody did. It's been 40 years, but I can't let it go."

The children of Bill Miller couldn't possibly know the final twist the case would take in the weeks leading up to the publication of this article.

'I killed Bill Miller'

"I did a bad thing last night," Garrett told his wife, according to a statement she gave police. "And I will probably feel bad about it for a few months. I killed Bill Miller last night."

Naomi Garrett's recounting of an apparent confession by her husband to killing Billy Miller comes halfway through a long written statement about how her husband and his friend had, for more than a year, "been working together, breaking into places." The two 39-year-olds made weekly stops at the office of Muncie physician Jules LaDuron for "diet pills."

But Garrett — who had earlier produced a half-dozen hundred dollar bills and other currency, prompting his wife to assume "he probably had broken in some place" — had in recent days expressed anger at Miller. Garrett saw in a newspaper article that a finance company office had been broken into.

"I told Miller that was my hit," Naomi Garrett quoted her husband as saying. "I am going to have to stomp him."

Later, in the early morning hours of May 10, David Gordon Garrett came back to their Muncie home, got into bed, and matter-of-factly told his wife that he had killed Miller.

A few hours later, Garrett picked up the couple's 10-year-old son from Washington Carver school and told his wife they would be back "in a few days."

Naomi Ruth Garrett gave different versions of her story in the same statement to police, however. She noted that at one point her husband said he only "stomped" Billy Miller. At one point, she said, David Gordon Garrett said he and Miller had just broken into a building when they heard someone yelling "Hey, wait a minute" at them. Garrett said he ran but heard shots ring out. He didn't know what happened to Miller.

At the end of her statement, Garrett's wife noted that her husband told her he had thrown a gun into a river "but he didn't tell me where."

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Beth Miller (from left), Ivan Miller, and Debbie Downham pose for a picture by the memorial they placed to honor their father, Bill Miller, at 666 Lincoln in Dunkirk Monday, August 5, 2013. Bill Miller was shot to death in May 1973, and his body was found in a vacant lot near 666 Lincoln. The Miller siblings, who were children when their father was killed, grew up and collected court documents and other records about the case in their effort to see their father's killer brought to justice.(Photo: Ashley L. Conti / The Star Press)

'Death in the family?'

Between the time David Gordon Garrett picked up his son at his Muncie school and the time he was arrested in Richmond a few days later, a friend, R. C. Staggs, told Muncie police that he got a call from Garrett.

"What is going on back there?" Staggs recalled Garrett asking.

"The law is looking for you," Staggs said.

"What for?" Garrett asked. "There been a death in the family or something?"

"Yeah, something like that," Staggs told police he said to Garrett. "They found Miller's body."

"Who put them on me? Miller's stepbrother?" Garrett asked.

After being told that he had "made the front page," Garrett asked, "Did they have a picture of me?" He hung up after telling Staggs he was "down south."

Once Garrett was arrested, police in Muncie and Dunkirk were confident he would be convicted.

Gerald Kirby was Dunkirk's police chief at the time. Although he was later elected sheriff of Jay County, Kirby was a young officer in 1973. "I was looked down on as the rookie in the outfit," Kirby recalled recently.

Kirby didn't know Miller or Garrett before the night Miller's body was found.

"The investigation indicated the victim and the man that was accused were in low-level criminal activities, burglaries and that type of thing," Kirby said. "The premise of the arrest was a poor split in a burglary that led to a murder."

Garrett's attorney was granted a change in venue for the murder trial to Circuit Court in Henry County, where it was held in early 1974. Things didn't go as planned for police and prosecutors.

"We went to trial on the testimony of people and, by God, some testified backwards on us," Kirby recalled. "They said one thing in statements and then another in court. ... I could not believe it."

The Henry County jury found David Gordon Garrett not guilty of murdering Billy Miller.

In the years that followed the trial, Kirby kept his eyes open for any word of further brushes with the law for Garrett.

"I'd see his name in the paper every once in a while. I would say, 'All right, you son of a b----, you had it coming.

"The wrong one died," said Kirby, now 76 and retired.

Jerry Cook, now chief investigator for the Delaware County prosecutor's office, remembered Garrett well. Cook was an officer on the Delaware County sheriff's department in the 1970s, first as a reserve then as a deputy.

"Every time you turned around, (Garrett) was getting arrested for something. It was usually burglaries or fights or being drunk. Dave was one of those guys you could count on, after a weekend, seeing his name on the jail log."

Garrett was in the Delaware County jail so often that he became a trustee and worked in the kitchen.

His criminal activities continued beyond the 1970s, and included a Kentucky burglary that led to a two-year prison term in the Bluegrass State. His final conviction, in Delaware County for deception, came in 2000.

Peace of mind

Once they grew up, Beth and Debbie Miller began researching their father's murder. They went to libraries to get copies of old newspaper articles and to the Henry County courthouse to get copies of documents. Their research turned up a half-brother in California they didn't know they had.

They put a cross on the lot in Dunkirk, near the railroad tracks where their father's body was found. They later planted a rose bush nearby.

And they dreamed of one day seeing David Gordon Garrett arrested for their father's murder.

"Mom said she decided a long time ago she was going to let this lie," Beth Miller said. "If it gives us kids peace of mind to talk about it, that was fine with her. She didn't even want to talk about it."

Beth Miller said she knew double jeopardy laws wouldn't allow Garrett to be tried again four decades after the fact. She said she hoped, however, that renewed attention would prompt some new development, perhaps previously unknown information from a friend of Garrett or even the son who accompanied him out of town after the killing.

One thing is certain: David Gordon Garrett won't ever talk again about the crime for which he was tried and acquitted. After interviews were done for this article, but in the weeks before it was published, Garrett died at age 79.

The Star Press contacted two of Garrett's adult children and spoke at length with one, who didn't want to be quoted in this article but said the family had experienced upset and uncertainty over the past 40 years and, most recently, grief over Garrett's death on July 17.

Grief was not among the emotions that Beth Miller felt when she heard that David Gordon Garrett had died before the Cold Case article about the 40-year-old crime could be published. Miller's sister called and told her that Garrett's obituary was in The Star Press.

"It was total shock," Miller said. "The first thing that entered my mind was, 'He got away with it all over again.' He had lived for 40 years and a few weeks before he might have to answer some questions ... I was hoping he might answer some questions."

"I know he's had to answer to God, but I wanted him to answer to us first."

Miller said she felt sympathy for the children in both families, including Garrett's children.

"They're victims too. You still love your dad, no matter what. I don't blame them because their dad killed our dad. This affects a lot of people. It hurts a lot of people that are innocent, all because of one guilty person."